victorian literature & culturethe journal of eighteenth

This book reopens the question of Rousseau’s influence on theFrench Revolution and on English Romanticism, by examining therelationship between his confessional writings and his politicaltheory. Gregory Dart argues that by looking at the way in whichRousseau’s writings were mediated by the speeches and actions ofthe French Jacobin statesman Maximilien Robespierre, we can gaina clearer and more concrete sense of the legacy he left to Englishwriters. He shows how the writings of William Godwin, MaryWollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt rehearseand reflect upon the Jacobin tradition in the aftermath of theFrench revolutionary Terror.

Gregory Dart is lecturer in English at the University of York. Hestudied at Cambridge and has published in Victorian Literature &Culture, The Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the bulletin of theBritish Association of Romantic Studies.

ROUSSEAU, ROBESPIERRE AND ENGLISHROMANTICISM

General editorsProfessor Marilyn Butler Professor James Chandler

University of Oxford University of Chicago

Editorial boardJohn Barrell, University of York

Paul Hamilton, University of LondonMary Jacobus, Cornell University

Kenneth Johnston, Indiana UniversityAlan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara

Jerome McGann, University of VirginiaDavid Simpson, University of California, Davis

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fieldswithin English literary studies. From the early s to the early s a formi-dable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not justin poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes ofwriting. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, andthe political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworthcalled those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: theFrench Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, indus-trialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform move-ment at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretendedotherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literaturewere reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender rela-tions in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbettand Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the CockneySchool. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has pro-duced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses ofmodern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of thosenotions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history,on which modern scholarship in English has been founded.

The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recenthistoricist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challeng-ing corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism theyhave helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, thisone will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, oneither side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.

For a complete list of titles published see end of book

Rousseau, Robespierre and English

Romanticism

GREGORY DART

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge , United Kingdom

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk

West th Street, New York, –, USA http://www.cup.org Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne , Australia

© Gregory Dart

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevantcollective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without

the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in Baskerville MT / ⁄ []

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Dart, Gregory, –.Rousseau, Robespierre, and English Romanticism / Gregory Dart.

p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in Romanticism; )Includes bibliographical references and index.

. English literature – th century – History and criticism.

. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – th century.. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – th century.

. English literature – th century – History and criticism.. France – History – Revolution, – – Influence.

. Robespierre, Maximilien, – – Influence. . Rousseau,Jean-Jacques, – – Influence. . English literature – Frenchinfluences. . Romanticism – Great Britain. I. Title. II. Series.

PR.FD .′–dc –

hardback

‘To my father & mother Edward and Jean,and my two sisters Leah and Katie.’

Contents

List of illustrations page xAcknowledgements xi

Introduction Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of

politics

The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre

Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin’s CalebWilliams

‘The Prometheus of Sentiment’: Rousseau, Wollstonecraftand aesthetic education

Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the populationcontroversy

‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth and thepolitics of the Mountain

‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and the resistance toreform

Notes Bibliography Index

ix

Illustrations

. Sketch of Robespierre (), by Gérard, muséeCarnavelet, Paris. No. CAR A. page

. ‘Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champ de Mars’ (),watercolour by Naudet, musée Carnavelet, Paris. No. CAR A.

. ‘View of the Chariot which was used at the Festival of the Supreme Being on the Prairial, year two’ (),anonymous engraving, musée Carnavalet, Paris No. CAR A.

. ‘The Sanculotte rendering homage to the Supreme Being’(), engraving by Aveline, musée Carnavelet, Paris. No. CAR NB.

. ‘The Triumph of the Republic’ (), Pierre Michael Alix,musée Carnavelet, Paris. No. CAR A.

x

Acknowledgements

Many people have suffered in the making of this project; countless inno-cent victims have been caught up in its violent and erratic progress. Hereis a list of the ones who made the most heroic efforts to keep it on course.My greatest debt of gratitude is to my former supervisor Nigel Leask, atruly remarkable man, who has been an unfailing source of knowledgeand inspiration to me over the past decade. And not far behind himcome John Whale, John Barrell, Hugh Haughton, Jack Donovan,Harriet Guest, Ludmilla Jordanova, Stephen Copley, Howard Erskine-Hill, Alan Forrest and Norman Hampson, who have all offered con-structive criticism of my work at one time or another, not to mentionJames Chandler and the anonymous readers at Cambridge UniversityPress, whose late suggestions for revision were a great help. In addition,I should like to thank my undergraduate director of studies Fred Parker,for so skilfully fanning the first flames of my revolutionary enthusiasm,and also Louise Hoole, Juliet Osborne and Mark Hallett, for havingbeen prepared to live with the fumes. Finally, I must express my grati-tude to Josie Dixon at Cambridge University Press, for her considerablekindness and understanding during the preparation of the typescript.

xi

Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and theillusion of politics

Concerning the French, I wish Buonaparte had stayed in Egypt,and that Robespierre had guillotined Sieyès. These cursed complexgovernments are good for nothing, and will ever be in the hands ofintriguers. The Jacobins were the men; and one house of repre-sentatives, lodging the executive in committees, the plain andcommon system of government. The cause of republicanism isover, and it is now only a struggle for dominion. There wanted aLycurgus1 after Robespierre, a man loved for his virtue, and bold,and inflexible, and who should have levelled the property of France,and then would the Republic have been immortal, and the worldmust have been revolutionised by example.2

At the end of a letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge of December ,which was written immediately after Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of Brumaire, the young republican poet Robert Southey expressed sen-timents which went directly against the grain of history. Not only did hedistance himself from the counter-revolutionary consensus that wasgrowing in England at this time, he also rejected the claims of Bonaparteand Emmanuel Sieyès that the French Constitution of representedthe final fulfilment of the revolutionary ideal.3 In his impatience withcontemporary politics on either side of the Channel, Southey harkedback to the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, the period lastingfrom to during which the First Republic had been governedaccording to uncompromisingly egalitarian principles. As is well known,this phase was to culminate in Maximilien Robespierre’s infamous‘Reign of Terror’, which resulted in the imprisonment and execution ofmany thousands of people. By fewer and fewer English radicals stilllooked to France as the land of liberty and promise, and an even smallernumber were concerned to rehabilitate Robespierre’s reputation. How

then do we explain Southey’s belated enthusiasm for neo-Spartan prin-ciples? To what extent was it shared by other radical writers of theperiod? And how significant is it to an understanding of EnglishRomanticism in general?

By the later s the leading propagandists of the English counter-revolution were committed to vilifying Robespierrist Jacobinism. Aboveand beyond that, however, they were also keen to collapse the differencesbetween the various phases of the Revolution. In one of the firstextended historical accounts of the period, a two-volume set ofBiographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (), John Adolphus was torepresent it as a uniformly disastrous phenomenon, rehearsing thecharge that had been made earlier and even more forcefully by EdmundBurke in his Letters on the Regicide Peace of –. And as time went on notonly staunch loyalists like Adolphus and Burke, but also former radicalslike Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to endorse this version of events.Ten years after receiving the letter quoted above, Coleridge was strivingto show the ideological unity of the French Revolution by arguing thatphilosophical radicalism, Robespierrist Jacobinism and Bonapartismwere all products of the misguided rationalism of the FrenchEnlightenment.4 Clearly, in order to reject French revolutionary princi-ples wholesale, it was necessary to argue that they made a whole.Southey’s letter ought to remind us, however, not to accept the counter-revolutionary narrative unquestioningly. It alerts us to the fact that it wasactually under construction during this period, and that there were stillother versions of revolutionary history available during the early s.Southey describes Jacobinism in a way that clearly identifies it as a tradi-tion of political primitivism, a ‘plain and common system of govern-ment’ to be contrasted with the ‘cursed complex’ constitution of the newBonapartist regime. The would-be dictator Napoleon Bonaparte andthe liberal constitutionalist Emmanuel Sieyès are both condemned forintroducing a set of legislative arrangements designed to staunch indi-vidual freedom and stifle the exercise of virtue. The Jacobins, by con-trast, are celebrated for their simplicity and austerity, their neo-Spartanenthusiasm for moral regeneration and their anti-modern mistrust ofprivate property. In this way Southey establishes a distinction betweenprimitive simplicity and modern complexity, both of which were cham-pioned at different times during the legislative history of the Revolution,but only one of which, in his eyes, was a proper expression of the revolu-tionary ideal.

In wishing that there had been a ‘Lycurgus after Robespierre’ to bring

Despotism of liberty

about a republic of true liberty and equality, Southey comes close torepeating the sentiments he had expressed five years earlier in a letterfollowing hard upon news of the Thermidorean conspiracy, where hehad described Robespierre as a ‘benefactor of mankind’ whose deathwas to be lamented as ‘the greatest misfortune Europe could have sus-tained’. Despite or perhaps even because of his ‘great bad actions’ hewas seen as the modern incarnation of the ancient legislator, a manwhose courageous pursuit of moral regeneration had been ‘sacrificed tothe despair of fools and cowards’.5 Admittedly, Southey did not alwayssustain this attitude, briefly succumbing to the appeal ofThermidoreanism, which sought to demonise the Jacobin leader as ameans of recuperating the Revolution’s ‘beau idéal’. Nevertheless, for allits fitfulness, the unexpected survival of Southey’s Robespierrismthrough years of political disappointment and disillusionment invites usto question modern assumptions about the decline of radical enthusi-asm among the English radical intelligentsia in the later s.According to most commentators, figures such as Southey, Wordsworthand Coleridge moved slowly but surely away from radical politics in theaftermath of the Terror, so that from onwards they were takinggradual steps on the road to conservatism.6 But Southey’s letters suggestthat this political trajectory may have been more eccentric and unstablethan the orthodox account will allow, prone to curious revolutions ofthought and sudden resurrections of feeling. It also suggests that theleading writers of the English Romantic movement may have had adeeper investment in the political psychology of revolutionary republi-canism than has been generally recognised by literary history, much ofwhich has interpreted the radicalism of figures such as Wordsworth,Coleridge and Southey almost entirely in terms of English traditions ofcivic humanism and/or radical dissent.7

In drawing attention to the crisis of representation that was provokedby the revolution, to the contemporary struggle to give this violent andunpredictable phenomenon some kind of narrative form, RonaldPaulson’s Representations of Revolution was a significant contribution to theliterary history of the s. But in drawing such a hard and fast distinc-tion between French and English versions of the revolutionary ‘plot’,Paulson tends to neglect the interplay of mutual influence. He suggeststhat the French political class wanted to see the Revolution as a neo-clas-sical drama, or a ‘primitivist’ romance, but that the unruliness of itsprogress often made such generic straitjackets woefully inadequate.

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Then he goes on to argue that the English, by contrast, tried to makesense of events in France by filtering them through the literary categoriesof sentimental fiction, gothic drama and grotesque farce.8 SincePaulson, a number of critics have sought to fill in the details of his highlysuggestive but necessarily rather general account.9 But there has been noserious attempt to argue for the influence of French revolutionary formsand contexts upon English literary practice. This is not merely a ques-tion of showing that figures such as Wordsworth, Godwin,Wollstonecraft and Hazlitt were well versed in the nice distinctions inFrench politics, but of arguing that the literary dynamics of their workcan only be understood with reference to the complex patterns of plotand counter-plot, denunciation and confession that we find in Frenchrepublicanism. The fact that Southey felt ‘the cause of republicanism’to be over in did not prevent him from fantasising a new Lycurgus.Similarly, in a famous passage on the French Revolution from Book ofThe Prelude of , William Wordsworth admitted to retaining a ‘Creedwhich ten years have not annull’d’ that ‘the virtue of one paramountmind / Would have . . . clear’d a passage for just government, / And lefta solid birthright to the State, / Redeem’d according to example given/ By ancient Lawgivers’.10 In texts such as this the ideology ofJacobinism survived neither as an allegiance to the French nation assuch, nor even as the literary remains of a legislative programme, but asa complex of representational strategies, a characteristic mode of appre-hending the relationship between politics and society.

Before addressing the influence of ‘Jacobinism’ upon EnglishRomantic writing, however, it is necessary to obtain a clearer senseof what we mean by this term. It is important to differentiate ‘Jacobinprimitivism’ from the other forms of Jacobinism to which the Revolutiongave rise, forms such as the liberal theory of ‘complex government’referred to by Southey. The first two chapters of this book will be cen-trally concerned to explore this phenomenon. For it is my contentionthat it is only by distinguishing between the two main bodies of politicaltheory that went into the making of revolutionary ‘Jacobinism’,11 bour-geois liberalism on the one hand, and Rousseauvian civic humanism onthe other – a theoretical distinction that Robespierre tried to transforminto a practical difference between the Jacobins and the Gironde – thatwe can truly understand the political psychology of French middle-classrepublicanism, its fratricidal tensions, its metaphysic of morals, and itsdisplacements of its own class bias.


In the late s the worsening financial crisis in the French governmentfuelled an increasingly widespread and vociferous enthusiasm for eco-nomic and political reform. As the crisis reached its height, Louis XVIagreed to reconvene the Estates General in order that a broad consensuscould be reached on the economic and fiscal measures required toremedy the situation. Emmanuel Sieyès’s celebrated pamphlet Qu’est-ceque le tiers état? was prompted by the king’s pronouncement that the threeEstates should meet and vote separately, as they had done in , andnot as a unified body, as most reformers had hoped. Daringly, Sieyès pro-posed a single national government by the commoners of the ThirdEstate, considering that this was the only way to banish the feudalism andcorporatism which had stifled French life. Drawing heavily on the writ-ings of Turgot, Quesnay and the Enlightenment physiocrats, he arguedfor a system of representative government in which private personswould be able to gather together to assist in the formation of a trulypublic authority while safeguarding the freedom of private commerce.12

In his discussion of the public good and its relation to private concerns,Sieyès unashamedly employed the language of the joint-stock company,indicating the inextricable link which existed at this time between liberalnotions of political reform and the logic of laissez-faire capitalism. In hiseyes, the individual had a ‘share’ in the general good, so it was in his ownprivate interest to make a ‘useful alliance’ with it.

According to Sieyès, the central impediment to the development ofthis enabling separation of public and private, was corporate privi-lege, the system of monopolies and exemptions which characterisedeighteenth-century French society. Of all these corporate interests, thenobility was widely considered to be the largest and the mostunjustified. Having been divested as a body of its former public roleduring the early modern period, by the mid-s the French aristoc-racy had become largely unrelated to the public authority of the state,preserving only the vestiges of its former ‘publicness’, the theatricalshow of privileges, titles and trappings attacked by Rousseau in his Lettreà d’Alembert of . Once brought under public scrutiny, Sieyès believedthat the exclusive principle of aristocracy could not hope to remainintact, for it was ‘alien’ to the nation, ‘first of all on principle, since itsbrief does not derive from the people, secondly on account of itspurpose, since it consists in the defence not of the general but of theparticular interest’.13


Significantly, as he developed his critique, Sieyès was not contentmerely to identify the nobility as an expensive and dysfunctionalmonopoly (–), he was also driven to depict it as an evil sicknessgnawing away at the heart of a virtuous nation (). And in emphasis-ing his opposition to feudal privilege, he regularly slipped from thevocabulary of interest employed by the physiocrats into the republicandiscourse of civic virtue that had been developed by Rousseau.14

While aristocrats will speak of their honour and keep watch over their interest,the Third Estate, which is to say, the Nation, will develop its virtue, because ifcorporate interest is egotism, the national interest is virtue. ()

Amid the excitement of the principles of Rousseauvian civichumanism and bourgeois liberalism were frequently juxtaposed by therevolutionary bourgeoisie, with the result that a quintessentially meta-physical language of public virtue was often dovetailed and confusedwith a fundamentally commercial language of shared interest. However,as the Revolution progressed, the fundamental differences that existedbetween these two discourses began to manifest themselves, and this wasinstrumental in creating the fratricidal tension which came to character-ise middle-class French Jacobinism. But in order to be able to under-stand the historical and political consequences of this ideologicalconfusion, it is first of all necessary to analyse its nature. With this inmind, I shall now seek to contrast Rousseau’s politics of the will with thepolitics of interest that had been developed by the physiocrats.

In his Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts of , Jean-Jacques Rousseaudeveloped his celebrated critique of the progress of civilisation. He con-sidered that contemporary civilisation was corrupting the pursuit ofknowledge; that the development of reason was being inhibited by thedemands and constraints of patronage, salon culture and the literarymarket-place; and that philosophy was being turned into an aristocraticornament, a kind of luxury commodity to be circulated and exchangedlike the latest fashion. His proposed remedy was for the king himself torescue the most enlightened of his subjects from the corruptions of thecourt by appointing them as his independent advisers.15 This gesture wasvery much a response to the circumstances arising from the radicalseparation of the French monarchical state from the private realm ofcivil society during the ancien régime. Debarred from a role in the


political realm of legislation and administration, philosophy had beenleft to shift for itself in the private realm of the market-place and aristo-cratic patronage. Only if philosophers could free themselves from thecorrupting circumstances of economic dependence, Rousseau argued,could they return to the pursuit of virtue and reason. In this, his firstextended analysis of the problems besetting modern societies, he was notfar from the model of enlightened absolutism that was favoured by thephysiocrats. In later works, however, Rousseau grew rather more scepti-cal of the project of Enlightenment, whether conducted from within thebourgeois public sphere in the private realm of letters, or through themachinery of the monarchical state. So much so, indeed, that he gradu-ally came to consider the productions of former colleagues and friendssuch as Denis Diderot, Claude Helvétius and Baron Holbach as tendingto naturalise the unjustices and prejudices of modern society rather thanresist them. He became increasingly sceptical of the value of philosophi-cal and literary debate as a vehicle for political change, and increasinglycommitted to the notion of an unreflective consensus as the sovereignprinciple of legislation.

In the course of his examination of the characteristics of a legitimatestate in the Contrat Social of , Rousseau developed a theory of civilliberty that would allow each individual to enjoy the security afforded bycivil society without renouncing all claim to the liberty that was hisnatural birthright. He did this by introducing a form of citizenship inwhich the individual would identify himself with the general will of thewhole community, renouncing all his natural rights in order to receivethem back on a political basis. According to this view of things, eachman would give himself to no one in giving himself to all. The generalwill would never be oppressive or unjust, in Rousseau’s analysis, since allthe conditions would be the same for everyone, so that no single personwould have any interest in making them burdensome for others.16 In hismind, the achievement of moral liberty through political activity wasmore important than the freedom to pursue one’s private interests: ‘themere impulse of appetite is slavery’, he wrote, in what amounted to aparadoxical critique of Lockean liberalism, ‘while obedience to a lawwhich one prescribes to oneself is liberty’.17

Famously, Rousseau was adamant that the general will could not act:it was a legislative power, not an executive one. Thus it needed a bodyof ministers to implement its laws, a body that would have to be periodi-cally vetted by the sovereign, and replaced at regular intervals to preventit from being corrupted by power. In favour of an elected executive,


Rousseau was nevertheless resistant to the notion of an elected legisla-ture, and implacably opposed to the notion that the latter could everpossess sovereignty, for according to him sovereignty could only ever restwith the nation. ‘Every law which the people has not ratified in person’,he wrote, ‘is null; it is not a law’.18 Unable to suggest ways in which thissovereignty might express itself in a large state such as France, Rousseauescaped from this conceptual difficulty by throwing down a set ofrhetorical challenges to his reader. He implied that the inability of thepresent generation to imagine how an entire people could be assembledto legislate in the national interest was itself a sign of the alienation ofcivilised man: ‘You sacrifice more for profit than for liberty’, he declaredto his readers, ‘and fear slavery less than poverty.’19

The extent to which Rousseau did not offer a practical programmefor the setting up of a republican state has often been noted. Many criticsand political historians have found it extremely abstract in comparisonwith other seminal texts in the history of political theory. Yet it has notperhaps been sufficiently noticed that it is precisely at those momentswhen practical problems begin to crowd in, that Rousseau activelyexploits the modern difficulty of imagining true citizenship. For incertain respects, the deliberately paradoxical style of the Contrat Socialseems expressly designed to force each reader to discover for himself theextent of his own corruption:

In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies: under a bad govern-ment no one cares to stir a step to get to them, because no one is interested inwhat happens there, because it is foreseen that the general will shall not prevail,and lastly because domestic cares are all-absorbing . . . As soon as any man asksWhat does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost.20

In this startling example of negative thinking, Rousseau defines thepublic good almost exclusively in terms of the private obstacles to be sur-mounted in the course of its pursuit. Crucially, he imagined publicopinion as a form of general sentiment anterior to critical debate, ‘morea consensus of hearts than of arguments’, as Jürgen Habermas haspointed out,21 inviting an entire generation of readers to rediscoverwithin themselves an enthusiasm for civic virtue by goading them to dis-prove his pessimistic assessment of them.

This stands in sharp contrast to the model of municipal governmentpromulgated by the physiocrats. For example, in his Mémoire sur les muni-cipalités of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot had proposed a system inwhich village assemblies representing local property interests would


control their own affairs while at the same time sending delegates tocounty assemblies to address larger questions of policy. These countyassemblies would, in their turn, elect deputies to represent them atregional and then at national level, thus building up a highly organisedconsultative network based on the balancing of interests. And by thismeans, a national network of political discussion would be established,involving propertied citizens at every level, out of which a truly publicopinion would be formed.

Now as is quite evident, this model differed greatly from Rousseau’sconception of the ideal form of political life, which drew heavily on thedemocratic tradition of the ancient republics of Greece. For he consid-ered that full political rights should be accorded to all the men of anation, irrespective of their wealth, and should express itself in the formof a direct participation in the process of legislation. In place of Turgot’sproperty principle, he introduced a strongly affective element into thediscourse of politics, considering an enthusiasm for the public good theonly necessary qualification for citizenship. Moreover, to his mind, thetrue general will of a nation was not an aggregate or critical synthesis ofits individual wills – ‘a will of all’ as in Turgot – it was a metaphysicalprinciple, a form of aspiration towards the public good that necessitateda complete transcendence of private interests. Thus it was that by locat-ing political virtue in the hearts of men rather than in the ownership ofproperty, Rousseau effectively succeeded in reworking ancient civichumanism into a politics of sensibility.

In the English civic humanist tradition of the eighteenth century theindependent landed aristocrat remained the type of the free citizen, hislanded wealth supposedly providing him with a permanent interest inthe wealth of his country as well as a moral bulwark against the cor-rupting influence of credit and commerce.22 In France, however, the per-petuation of feudal privileges and the declining public role of thenobility during the course of the s made it less easy for the pre-rev-olutionary bourgeoisie to regard the abstract figure of the aristocrat asthe model of disinterested virtue. It was not surprising, therefore, that inhis search for a prototype of the free and independent man Rousseau,like Montesquieu before him, was to look to distant models, celebratingthe legislators of seventeenth-century Geneva and fifth-century Greece.Nor was it surprising that he should have found it necessary to fudge thecrucial question of the relationship between land and civic virtue, con-tinually invoking the patriotic zeal of the Spartans and Athenians, andemphasising their fervent local attachments, while consistently under-


playing the extent to which they too had seen property as the absolutefoundation of politics.

Given its appeal beyond the borders of France in the revolutionaryperiod, it is important to emphasise the truly paradoxical nature ofRousseau’s civic humanism. On the one hand the Contrat Social attachedgreat importance to patriotism and local tradition as a means of cement-ing national unity, but it also presumed that it was possible to generate‘primitive’ republican virtue ab initio from a purely theoretical model. Inthis respect it was both a product of, and a resistance to the ‘travellingtheory’ of the French Enlightenment.23 Whereas the new social scienceof Turgot and Claude-Adrien Helvétius was truly cosmopolitan innature, proposing a rational re-organisation of government and the lawwhich was not subject to space or time, in much of Rousseau’s writinggood government was always to be sensitive to local conditions, with theconstitution of a country emerging from the autochthonous customs ofits people.24 Oddly enough, therefore, the Contrat Social represented acurious blend of the ancient and modern traditions, offering a surpris-ingly cosmopolitan rendering of the ‘localist’ ideal. Within its pages itsauthor supplied a theoretical model for the regeneration of a polis, butwithout suggesting how it might have to be adapted to fit specific con-temporary circumstances.25 In this way, as Allan Bloom has recentlyreiterated, ‘Rousseau introduced the taste for the small, virtuous com-munity into the modern movement towards freedom and equality’,26

effectively encouraging the revolutionary fantasy that it might be possi-ble to reinvent a modern nation like France or England in the likenessof a city-state.

Given his solid grounding in physiocratic theory, why, then, did the AbbéSieyès choose to supplement his fundamentally liberal theory of govern-ment with the dangerous rhetoric of Rousseauvian republicanism?According to Keith Michael Baker, he did so because it was the readiestmeans of forestalling the crisis of representation which was threatenedby the proposed revolt of the Third Estate.27 Without a tradition ofparliamentary government, the French monarchical state as it stood in was peculiarly ill-equipped to make the transition from an absolutemonarchy to a modern liberal democracy, primarily because its constitu-tion recognised no sovereign principle apart from the king. Of course,there were occasional assemblies like the aristocratic parlements and the


Estates General, whose purpose was to petition the king on behalf ofvarious sections of his people, but they did so purely as mandataires andnot as representatives. For according to the neo-Hobbesian theory by whichFrance was governed, the king was the sole sovereign principle of thenation, and thus he alone was capable of representing it.

This is not to say that there were not theories of representativegovernment in circulation during the late s. On the contrary, acurrent of thought running from Honoré Gabriel Riquet Mirabeau andTurgot through to François Quesnay and the physiocrats had succeededin developing a number of different proposals for a system of nationalrepresentation. The problem was that this body of theory had conceivedof representation almost entirely in administrative and economic terms,it left the tricky question of political sovereignty entirely untouched.Hence Sieyès’s decision to make use of the Contrat Social in his Qu’est-ceque le tiers état? was almost certainly motivated by the realisation thatRousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty provided one of the onlymeans of justifying the proposed rebellion of the Third Estate againstthe Estates General.28 In his celebrated treatise, Rousseau had made apoint of insisting upon the absolute and inalienable sovereignty of thegeneral will. A monarch might be employed as an executive minister ofa nation, he acknowledged, but it was a dangerous mistake to imaginethat he could ever possess sovereignty. Moreover, it was absolutelyimpossible, according to Rousseau, that a nation could ever be boundagainst its will to a particular constitution, because it was itself theprimary legislative principle of the state, the origin and cause of all lawand government. It is not surprising, therefore, that Sieyès should havebeen keen to employ this concept of popular sovereignty during theconstitutional crisis of , for it allowed him to recommend the trans-formation of the Third Estate into a new national assembly as anexample of the national will reaffirming its sovereign power over andabove a series of unjust laws and antiquated conventions. The only stick-ing-point was that, while Rousseau was very useful to Sièyes on thequestion of sovereignty, he was less than helpful on the matter of repre-sentation. For there was, as we have seen, a profound mistrust of repre-sentative government at the heart of Rousseau’s political theory, andindeed of any principle of political deputation that went beyond the oldmonarchical principle of the ‘binding mandate’. Hence the virtuosicblending of two fundamentally incompatible political discourses – apolitics based on property and interest, and one based on popularsovereignty – that Sieyès was forced to undertake, a blending which was,


initially at least, highly successful, in the sense that it played a major partin actually bringing the constitutional revolution of into being, butwhich was ultimately, however, quite radically unstable, in that it becamea source of increasing political tension as time went on, and the conflictbetween representative government and civic virtue began to make itselffelt.

And so, as we have seen, the distinctive relationship that existedbetween the different ‘Estates’ in eighteenth-century France rendered itdifficult for the bourgeois revolutionaries of to develop their critiqueof the culture of corporatism and protectionism which had brought thenation to the very brink of bankruptcy without launching into an attackon the fundamental principle of aristocracy. And this, in turn, played apart in inhibiting the formation of an English-style coalition of the prop-ertied élite during the constitutional period of the Revolution. Hencebourgeois revolutionaries like Sieyès and Mirabeau found themselvesrapidly impelled to ally themselves with ‘the people’, employing thevocabulary of popular sovereignty which had been developed byRousseau and his followers in an attempt to harness the insurrectionaryenergy of the sans-culottes in the service of their cause. Thus in many ofthe pamphlets of the constitutional period an essentially liberal commit-ment to property, law and freedom from state interference was danger-ously supplemented by the language of ancient democracy.

This served to render the Revolution radical from the beginning,according the popular discontents and disturbances of the period apolitical validity and significance they might not otherwise have pos-sessed. Moreover, the leading members of the Constituent Assemblysucceeded in politicising the urban sans-culottes without ever being pre-pared to placate them, promising liberty, equality and fraternity whilereally only being concerned to pursue a peculiarly modern, highlylimited and inescapably bourgeois notion of freedom. They may havebeen keen to invoke the principle of popular sovereignty in –, butthe Constitution they finally produced in contained a propertyqualification which effectively barred huge swathes of the populationfrom active citizenship.29 Having pandered to the economic and politi-cal aspirations of the working classes, and having allowed, and in manycases encouraged, the growth of a network of political clubs and pres-sure groups in the capital, ultimately they reneged on their politicalpromises. Such hypocrisy was always likely to incite popular resentmentand violence. And indeed it was in this way that the Frankenstein ofbourgeois politics encouraged the wrath of its ‘creature’ the Paris mob.


In this context, tensions began to develop between those bourgeoisrevolutionaries who believed themselves to be genuinely committed toRousseau’s democratic ideal, and those suspected of merely paying lip-service to its principles. In the years following , during which theRevolution was increasingly buffeted by acute financial crisis, foreigninvasion and civil war, the Jacobins emerged as the faction seeminglymost committed to the principle of popular sovereignty, striving to dis-tinguish themselves from what they considered to be the hypocriticalrepublicanism of the Girondins. In the autumn of MaximilienRobespierre, one of the radical leaders of the Jacobin club and a deputyin the newly formed National Convention, was moved to criticise theroom in the Tuileries that had been proposed as the site for the newnational assembly on account of the diminutive size of the publicgallery:

The entire nation has the right to know of the conduct of its representatives. Itwould be desirable, if it were possible, that the representative assembly shoulddeliberate in the presence of all Frenchmen. The meeting place of the legisla-tive body should be a grand and majestic edifice, open to twelve thousand spec-tators. Under the eyes of such a huge number of witnesses, neither corruptionnor intrigue nor treachery would dare to show themselves, the general will alonewould be heeded, the voice of reason and the public interest would have soleaudience.30

Siding with Rousseau against the physiocrats, Robespierre saw ‘publicopinion’ in terms of a single ‘voice of reason’ expressing itself sponta-neously and unreflectively; he did not represent it as a product ofrational-critical debate. Sharing the former’s mistrust of the principle ofrepresentation, he wanted the new assembly hall of the republic to be autopian realm of direct democracy, a room in which a large number ofcitizen-spectators could gather to supervise the workings of the legisla-tive body, considering that no intrigue or faction could survive in such apowerful vessel of the ‘general will’. A product of the general enthusi-asm for transparency which had been a leading characteristic of revolu-tionary politics since , there was nevertheless something almostpathological about Robespierre’s desire for openness, for increasinglyafter it contained within it a paranoid suspicion of opacity, an irra-tional mistrust of any individual or corporate body resisting the search-light of the state. Fuelled by the fantasy of reinventing France as anancient democracy, he decided to dispense with what liberal thinkerssuch as Sieyès and Turgot had considered to be the enabling reciprocityof the public and the private sphere by seeking to render everything


subject to public scrutiny. And finally this developed into an increasingtendency to see private gatherings of any kind as part of an active andmalevolent ‘aristocratic’ conspiracy against the war-torn republic ofFrance.31 It was entirely characteristic, then, that when he ultimatelygained real power in as a member of one of the executive com-mittees of the National Convention, his commitment to popular sover-eignty manifested itself in terms of a terrifying war of public authorityupon the very principle of private life.

Over the last twenty years there has been an ongoing battle within thefield of revolutionary historiography concerning the issue of whetherthe descent of the French Revolution into bloodshed and terror in– was a historical accident – the product of a chaotic confluenceof historical circumstances – or whether it was the logical outcome ofthe political ideology developed by the revolutionaries themselves.Where revisionary historians such as François Furet and Simon Schamahave argued that the widespread violence of the period was theinevitable consequence of the demand for bloodshed encoded withinthe ‘revolutionary catechism’, some commentators, such as the post-marxist historian Gwynne Lewis, have tried to argue that the Terror of– should be seen as an essentially reactionary measure, a desperateattempt to cope with the twin threat posed by the counter-revolution andpopular politics.32 One could argue, however, that this is something of afalse opposition, since these two different approaches are by no meansincompatible, either theoretically or practically. Indeed, as Lewis pointsout, it is actually possible to see them as standing in some kind of dialec-tical relation to one another, the product of a continuing but by nomeans necessary opposition in the field of historical studies betweensocial history and cultural history. In this study, therefore, I shall not beseeking to choose between these two explanatory models, but rather toacknowledge what is powerful and compelling in each, to highlight theadverse circumstances out of which the ideology of the Terror mighthave been seen to emerge, while also acknowledging the fatal principleat the heart of revolutionary discourse, its inescapable dynamic of fra-ternity and fratricide.

Robespierre’s response to the subsistence crisis of – provides agood example of the way in which the ‘revolutionary catechism’ was todevelop under the Jacobins. It came at a time when inflation had risen



. Sketch of Robespierre (), by Gérard, musée Carnavelet, Paris. The textunderneath reads: ‘green eyes, pale complexion, green striped nankeen jacket, bluewaistcoat with blue stripes, white cravate striped with red (sketch from the life at a

sitting of the Convention)’.

to such a height that suppliers of goods and services, such as farmers,merchants and grocers, became increasingly reluctant to part with theirassets. This caused prices to rise still further, setting off violent popularagitation and widespread allegations of hoarding. In response to thissituation, Girondins such as Jean Marie Roland de la Platière and MarieJean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet remained committed to theprinciple of free trade. But as the pressure brought to bear upon theNational Convention by the popular movement increased, Robespierrewas eventually moved to denounce the way in which the policy oflaissez-faire was being exploited by the cupidité homicide of the commer-cial interest.

In a move that was at once revolutionary and thoroughly anti-modern, he subordinated the right of property to the right of sub-sistence:

The food necessary to man is as sacred as life itself. Everything that is necessaryto the subsistence of the community is common property that belongs to societyas a whole. It is only the surplus which may become private property or be givenover to traders. Any mercantile speculation that I make at the expense of myfellows is not trade, it is robbery and fratricide.33

In the network of associations that had been bequeathed him byRousseau there were strong links in Robespierre’s mind between the evilsof commerce, the defence of its principles by Encyclopédistes such asTurgot, the patronage of such philosophes by eminent nobles, and theselfish greed of the aristocracy as a whole.34 This led him to question thedistinction that bourgeois economists had sought to make betweenmodern laissez-faire capitalism and the protectionism of the ancienrégime. For it seemed to him that in the new culture of free trade, cor-porate interests had not been eradicated, they had merely become lessvisible: aristocratic vices continued to lurk beneath the mask of publicpatriotism. Thus his allegation that ‘fratricidal’ sentiments were circu-lating within the class of négociants can be seen to have been based on thefear that the new culture of private enterprise merely perpetuated thecorruption of the feudal state. And the fact that some of the leadingGirondins did not seem to want to take action against hoarders onlyserved to confirm his growing impression that they were in some waycomplicit with the defenders of the old order. Indeed as time went on hebecame progressively more convinced that they were in fact secretlyhand-in-glove, both fuelled by selfish greed, and a desire to exploit themisfortunes of ‘the people’.


In the struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondins that tookplace between and Robespierre sought to associate Brissot35

and his associates with the aristocratic corruption of the ancien régimeby interpreting their professed admiration of the social and political the-ories of the philosophes as indicative of a continuing connection withcourt culture. In his analysis, Jean D’Alembert, Denis Diderot, Helvétiusand many of the other men of letters of the mid-century had all tried topass themselves off as men of independence and virtue, but ultimatelytime had proved them to be mere flatterers of the nobility, salonniers fullyconniving with the existing order. And what is more, they had made theirservility apparent in their persecution of Rousseau, who had recountedtheir universal conspiracy against him in the pages of his posthumousConfessions:

I could observe that the Revolution has made the great men of the ancienregime seem a lot smaller; that if the academicians and mathematicians whichMonsieur Brissot offers to us as models did combat and ridicule priests,36 never-theless they also courted the nobility, and worshipped kings, from which theygained much advantage, and everybody knows the ferocity with which they per-secuted virtue and the spirit of liberty in the person of Jean-Jacques, whosesacred image I see before me, the one true philosopher of that period whomerited those public honours which have since been offered only to charlatansand scoundrels.37

From onwards Robespierre was to make much of this linkbetween the Girondins and the philosophes. He was to deplore the factthat the Rolandins and Brissotins had abandoned the publicity of theJacobin club in order to discuss politics in the resolutely private salons ofthe rich. This confirmed them, in his mind, as ‘ambitious courtiers,adroit in the art of deception, who, hiding behind the mask of patriot-ism, meet frequently with the massed ranks of the aristocracy in orderto stifle my voice’.38 In public, he suggested, the Girondins might wearthe mask of patriotism, but in private they were speculating on thepossibility of improving their personal fortunes and furthering theirpolitical careers. Although they might invoke the principles of libertyand equality, and pay lip-service to the notion of public virtue, theirprivate behaviour showed them to be thorough hypocrites. One of theforemost charges that the Montagnards brought against the Brissotins attheir trial in the autumn of was that they had been ‘speculators’.The insinuation was that not only politically but also financially theserepublican brothers had been ‘playing the Revolution like a casino’, as


François Furet rather memorably described it. And spéculation wasdoubly reprehensible for Robespierre, in that, as in English, it referrednot only to the corrupt practice of gambling in stocks and shares, butalso, on a more explicitly political level, to the operations of a resolutelyprivate imagination, thus reinforcing the connection that the Jacobinswere fond of making between ‘progressive’ philosophy, bourgeois self-interest and moral corruption.

In his important study, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during theFrench Revolution, Patrice Higonnet gives a compelling account of therepublican phase of the Revolution which does much to explain, and inmany ways to support, Robespierre’s analysis of the political conduct ofthe Gironde. He considers that after the flight of the king to Varennesin , any possibility of a lasting entente between liberal nobles andthe socially conservative bourgeoisie was effectively ruined. As constitu-tional monarchy became less of an option, the middle class was driveninto an alliance with the people against the aristocracy. In – theGirondin faction saw war against Austria and Prussia as a way ofbinding the ‘plebs’ to the government and its constitution. In Higonnet’sanalysis, Brissot and his colleagues constructed the phantom of an aris-tocratic counter-revolution both inside and outside France as a means ofcementing national unity. He considers that their oratory against noblesduring this period was ‘largely for show’, in other words that the nobil-ity was merely a convenient scapegoat for the continuing economiccrisis, a way of deflecting the attention of the sans-culottes from theproblem of subsistence, and of distracting them from their own politicalagenda. He argues that the Girondins had no intention of acquiescingin the demands of the urban working class for a redistribution of prop-erty and for pension schemes for the poor, but they continued to indulgethe rhetoric of popular sovereignty in public while courting conservativeopinion in private.39

While it might be possible to argue that Higonnet seriously under-estimates the nature and scale of the counter-revolution at this time, andthereby fails to grasp the very real grounds the Girondins might have hadfor indulging in anti-aristocratic hysteria, his account of their apparentduplicity is highly illuminating. He sees a gap between their public pro-nouncements and their private sentiments during this period, arguingthat the very fact that their social and domestic movements were slightlyless than transparent to the public gaze was enough in itself to arousethe suspicions of many of their former colleagues in the Jacobin club.40


What rendered Robespierre immune from such suspicions was that hewas known by friends and enemies alike to have no private life. Not onlythat, but he was also known to have no private interests. There was noquestion of him ever having been guilty of any financial impropriety, asthere was with his flamboyant fellow Jacobin Georges Danton, nor ofhim being intemperate or immoderate in any way. Similarly, there wasno question of him having any personal allegiances to interfere with hisrepeatedly professed devotion to the public good. This was one of themain sources of his prolonged popularity, both in the Jacobin club andthe Paris Commune, the mainstays of his power, and in the NationalConvention, where he remained for a long time a figure of unimpeach-able virtue in the eyes of the vast majority of deputies, who remainedconvinced of his incorruptibility even after he had begun to emerge asa propagandist for terrorist principles. One of the most widely readauthorities on the Revolution during the Romantic period, the loyalisthistorian Lacretelle jeune, offers a remarkably vivid, if predictably ratherunsympathetic account of the appearance of complete integrity thatRobespierre displayed:

He was a man with a single thought, a single passion, a single will; his dark soulnever disclosed itself even to his accomplices; as insensible to pleasure as he wasto the affections which pass through the hearts of even the purest of men,nothing could distract him from his stubborn pursuit: invariable in hishypocrisy; it was always in the name of virtue that he would invite sedition orprovoke a massacre.41

Despite his evident mistrust of Robespierre’s ultimate intentions,Lacretelle helps to show why he seemed to embody the discourse ofpublic virtue more fully than any of his contemporaries. By adheringdoggedly to the logic of the revolutionary catechism, by endlessly pur-suing its core values, he was always able to suggest a certain half-heart-edness in his opponents’ political practice, which is one of the reasonswhy a detailed study of his writings and speeches can offer such a pow-erful insight into the political psychology of the Revolution as a whole.42

As François Furet has most memorably put it: ‘Robespierre is an immor-tal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a fewmonths, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragicdiscourse.’43


Having encouraged a high degree of political consciousness in the Parissans-culottes during the first years of the Revolution, it was difficult for theNational Convention to cope with the monster it had created. And by the enragés in the Paris sections had become so militant that even theradical deputies of the Mountain were finding them hard to control.Jacques Roux one of the leaders of the popular movement, was toexpress his dissatisfaction with the ‘Jacobin’ Constitution of June inthese outspoken terms:

Does it outlaw speculation? No. Have you decreed death for hoarders? No.Have you restricted freedom of trade? No. Well, we must inform you that youhave yet to go to the limits of securing happiness for the People. Liberty is nomore than a hollow mirage if one class freely can force another into starvationand continue unpunished. Equality is a vain mockery when the rich, throughmonopoly, can hold powers of literal life and death over their fellows.44

A political force of considerable power and autonomy, the sans-culotteshad an agenda of their own, and it was one with which the bourgeoisrevolutionaries in the Jacobin club were only partly in sympathy.45

During the autumn of Robespierre had attacked the Girondins foremploying the language of popular sovereignty without a propercommitment to it. But he himself was always to remain implacablyopposed to the systematic redistribution of landed property that waslater demanded by some of the leaders of the Paris sections.46 Despitehis apparently radical assertion of the right to subsistence, he was not,finally, a supporter of the loi agraire. But the history of the Revolutionsince had shown that it was impossible for a bourgeois revolution-ary to be seen to resist the will of ‘the people’, and so in order to disguisehis class bias from both the Paris sections and himself, Robespierre wasforced to displace his conflict with the sans-culottes onto a metaphysicalplane. He did this by transforming the Revolution from a campaign toimprove living standards into a war of public virtue against privatecorruption. Billed as a war of the general will against aristocratic con-spiracy, the revolutionary Terror of – can thus also be seen as anunconscious attempt to flee from the seemingly insoluble conflict thatwas raging at that time between the relative claims of poverty and prop-erty.

In a review in the Deutsch-franzöische Jahrbücher for , Karl Marxcriticised the Jacobins’ neglect of the social and economic causes of


inequality. According to this view of things, Robespierrist politics was anextreme manifestation of the Aristotelian notion of man as first andforemost a zoon politikon:

Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, theheroes of the French Revolution held social life to be the source of politicalproblems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as anobstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal systemof Spartan frugality.47

Implemented in response to the increasingly violent demands of theParis sections, Robespierre’s policy of the Maximum, which was institutedon September , was a desperate attempt to guarantee a supply offood to the poor and to eradicate hoarding by fixing the prices of groceryand household items at no more than a third above their level in . Itwas in many ways the inevitable sequel to his affirmation of the right ofsubsistence in . However, as soon as the measure was announced, allof the products which it sought to fix were bought up extremely rapidly,creating an immediate shortage. Soon producers were refusing to supplynew stock, which set off a fresh wave of accusations about hoarding. Inthe Maximum Marx saw, at one and the same time, the laudable expres-sion of egalitarian values and a complete failure to understand the basicprinciples of political economy. In his eyes it identified Robespierre inparticular as the epitome of the purely political intelligence, a man whoexisted entirely in the ‘imaginary’ realm of politics, interpreting eco-nomic inequality simply as a failure of the will. And whether one con-siders it an inept response to the economic problems of the period, or acourageous putting on, in the face of growing popular intimidation, ofthe harness of revolutionary necessity, this politics of the will was acharacteristic of Robespierre’s political theory. Indeed it formed theabsolute foundation of his justification of revolutionary government,which he was always keen to describe as the product of an active andvoluntary policy, rather than a set of desperate and expedient measures.

The first seeds of this new attitude to government were sown in thesummer of , when the revolutionary state began to award itselfextraordinary new powers designed to expedite not only the formulationand implementation of emergency legislation, but also to bring theapprehension and punishment of counter-revolutionary activists undercentral control. This process was already well underway by the timeRobespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety, but it was left to himand his formidable lieutenant Saint-Just to attempt its theoretical and


moral justification. Rocked by the royalist uprisings in north-westernand southern France, and continually harassed by angry allegationsfrom the leaders of the popular movement that the economic situationwas being exploited by the speculative practices of the mercantile bour-geoisie, he was eventually driven to cut through the Gordian knot of therevolutionary crisis by representing it as a single battle of wills:

One would say that the two opposing spirits that have been represented in thepast as disputing the empire of nature are at this significant moment in humanhistory locked in combat, in order to decide forever the destiny of the world,and that France is the stage of this formidable struggle.48

By this means, he transformed economic problems into political prob-lems; and questions of social practice into issues of political conscience.In his hands, the state became less interested in the difficult job of eradi-cating social injustice in civil society, and much more concerned topursue the revolutionary struggle in the ‘imaginary’ realm of politics. Inhis vision of things, everything that remained opaque to Jacobin politi-cal consciousness was re-imagined as a force that was fundamentallyinimical to it. The paradoxical suggestion in the Contrat Social that thosewho broke the laws of the state ceased to be entitled to its protection wasused to justify a purge of all those citoyens who were deemed to have actedin an unpatriotic fashion.49 As Saint-Just announced to the NationalConvention on the October :

It is not only the traitors whom you must punish, but also those who areindifferent; you must punish whoever is passive towards the Revolution anddoes nothing for it. For once the French people have expressed their will, every-thing that is opposed to it is outside the sovereign body; and everything that isoutside the sovereign body is an enemy.50

With the infamous ‘Law of Suspects’ of September , which waspassed in the same month as the Maximum, this approach was given leg-islative authority, for it contained a long list of the many ways in whicha citizen might render him or herself ‘suspect’ in the eyes of the govern-ment, a list which conflated major crimes such as actively conspiring tooverthrow the republic with such vague charges as failing to steadilymanifest one’s devotion to the Revolution. The immediate consequencesof this policy were harrowing, as the English poetess and travel writerHelen Maria Williams made clear, in the course of her vivid eye-witnessaccount of life in Paris during the autumn of :

The prisons became more and more crowded and increasing numbers wereevery day dragged to the scaffold. Suspect was the warrant of imprisonment, and


conspiracy was the watchword of murder. One person was sent to prison becausearistocracy was written on his countenance; another because it was said to bewritten in his heart. Many were deprived of liberty because they were rich;others, because they were learned, and most who were arrested enquired theirreasons in vain.51

This distinctive use of the word ‘suspect’ is highly characteristic of theJacobin period, primarily because it seems deliberately intended toprovoke fear through its elision of the difference between what it mightmean to be suspected of a crime and what it might mean to be guilty ofit. It presented the citizens of the First Republic with a stark choice:either to suspect or to be a suspect; it did not appear to recognise thepossibility that one might occupy a passive position between the two.Robespierre was always to maintain that good citizens had no reason tobe afraid of revolutionary government. As he said to the Convention inhis infamous speech on political morality of February : ‘The firstmaxim of your political creed must be to lead the people by reason andthe enemies of the people by terror.’52 But in many ways his language ofpolitical terror actually seems to have been designed to call the civicvirtue of each and every citizen into doubt, encouraging every man andwoman into a potentially endless round of anxious self-questioning, pre-cisely on account of the equation it made between fear and culpability.Transforming denunciation into a kind of revolutionary virtue, itdemanded from everyone an active engagement in the cause of liberty,politicising every aspect of social life. But it was also concerned to pre-serve the execution of revolutionary government as the ultimate pre-rogative of the committees and tribunals, ensuring that the actualexercise of political terror remained the monopoly of the state.

In Representations of Revolution Ronald Paulson used psychoanalytic theoryto shed light on the political culture of the French Revolution. He sawthe execution of the king in January as a revolutionary ‘killing ofthe father’ which brought about a collective regression in the Frenchpolitical class back to the stage of primary narcissism. In Paulson’s mind,this was linked with another kind of regression practised during theJacobin period: the adaption of neo-classical models of dress anddemeanour. More recently, Dorinda Outram has examined how thebourgeois revolutionaries tried to develop ‘stoical’ modes of behaviour


in order to try and represent to themselves their newfound politicalagency. Developing these insights, it might be possible to see the Jacobinperiod as a kind of historical version of Jacques Lacan’s famous ‘mirror’stage, that moment in the early life of a child when he or she glimpsesits own image in a mirror, and begins to develop a sense of its own sub-jectivity from the free-standing reflection there contained. The autono-my and agency that the still dependent infant sees in this reflection isentirely and completely imaginary, an unreachable ideal to which it willaspire in vain. Nevertheless, Lacan argues, it is only by identifying withthis image that the child begins to construct the fiction of an inde-pendent self, without which he cannot function as an active humanbeing.53

For the children of the French Revolution what was glimpsed in themirror of political theory was the realm of pure politics; and the imagecontained within it was the figure of the public man, a conception atonce at once inspiring and terrifying, inspiring in its ideal embodimentof freedom and autonomy, terrifying in its remorseless exposure ofprivate weakness and personal dependency. For this reason the image ofthe public man with which the revolutionaries identified was to take onthe ambivalence of the famous doppelgänger or ‘double’, eloquentlydescribed by Sigmund Freud in his much-quoted essay on ‘TheUncanny’. Anticipating Lacan, Freud interpreted this double, or mirror-image of the self, as a product of the primary stage of narcissism, seeingit as a figure that could be seen to offer ‘an insurance against the destruc-tion of the ego’, and thus a kind of ‘assurance of immortality’, but whichwas always capable of transforming itself, after that stage had been sur-mounted, into an uncanny ‘harbinger of death’. Thus despite its initialappearance as a guarantee of individual autonomy, the double, inFreud’s terms, always had the potential of becoming a terrifying figureof accusation and retribution.54

To some extent, this dynamic provides a model for thinking about theJacobin illusion of politics, which it might be helpful to regard as a kindof ‘double’ of social reality, an alternative universe of transparent andvoluntary action, acting as a kind of dangerous adjunct to the recalci-trant, reluctant realm of everyday civil society, at once its professed pro-tector and its potential persecutor. But it might also be seen to elucidateRobespierre’s role within the frame of the revolutionary drama, mostspecifically as the figure in whom the terrifying ambivalence of thepublic man was most powerfully present, a statesman who was for many


of his political contemporaries a kind of assurance of immortality,before his eventual metamorphosis into an uncanny harbinger of death.In her seminal work On Revolution Hannah Arendt found the source ofthis doubling and splitting in the very pages of the Contrat Social. In hereyes, it was Rousseau’s fundamentally dialectical definition of civicvirtue that led the revolutionaries to set themselves on the path to self-destruction. For he had suggested that in order to become a true citizenof the main body politic each particular man would have to rise againsthimself in his own particularity, thinking that it was only by this meansthat he would arouse in himself his own antagonist, the general will.Effectively, she reasoned, this meant that in the realm of his politicaltheory, to partake in citizenship ‘each national must rise and remain inconstant rebellion against himself ’.55

In the bitter struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondins whichtook place after the institution of the First Republic in , this ten-dency towards self-division at the heart of revolutionary discourseexpressed itself in terms of recurrent rhetoric of paradox. During thisperiod of republican in-fighting, both factions showed themselves to beassiduous practitioners of the ‘revolutionary catechism’, adopting dia-metrically opposed positions for identical reasons, which meant theyfound themselves employing a language that was often merely an echoof that of their antagonists. True patriotism was always being faced byits masked counterfeit, as Robespierre told the Girondins in November:

Thus, you only speak of dictatorship in order to exercise it yourself withoutrestraint, you only speak of proscriptions and tyranny in order to tyrannise andproscribe.56

Such formulations were to become a leading characteristic of the lan-guage of revolutionary government, which both feared and fed upon thepossibility that there might be an intimate link between apparent oppo-sites. History had taught the Jacobins that what had seemed a unitedfront against counter-revolution was always capable of dividing againstitself, as the revolutionary movement suffered a succession of supposed‘betrayals’ from within its own ranks, firstly from the feuillants, then fromthe Brissotins, and then finally, in the early part of , from both theDantonists and the so-called ultras. Betrayal was the recurrent nightmareof the First Republic, but it also became its energising principle. The sus-picion that people and principles might be subject to uncanny reversals,and that patriotism might turn out to be its opposite, helped to fuel the


policy of the Terror, but not without repeatedly calling the good faith ofits own practitioners into question.

Defending the Terror from the charge that it merely reproduced therepression of the ancien régime, Robespierre gave an extended speechon ‘political morality’ in February in which he offered a strikingformulation which sought to make an absolute distinction between thetwo:

The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.57

It is likely that Edmund Burke had this type of statement in mindwhen he said of the French nation in his Letters on the Regicide Peace that‘the foundation of their Republic is laid in moral paradoxes’, and thetemptation for historians has always been to share his rather scornfulview. But while it is of course important to acknowledge the deleterioushistorical consequences of this language of paradox, it is also worthrecognising the way in which, like the vocabulary of suspicion men-tioned above, it was a canny instrument of political terror. It was a pow-erful device because it forced its auditors into an active exploration ofthe distinction between revolutionary government and the absolutism ofthe ancien régime in a way that made any confusion between the twoseem a culpable failure of political understanding, for as Robespierreargued: ‘Those who . . . call the revolutionary laws arbitrary or tyranni-cal are stupid sophists who seek to confuse total opposites.’58 LikeRousseau, he suggested that those readers who found such statementsimpossible were almost certainly thinking too much, and in the wrongkind of way; a paradox, after all, was just another word for a new truth,a truth which had not yet become part of the general orthodoxy.

However, even as Robespierre’s paradoxical rhetoric laboured toestablish the absolute difference between republicanism and aristocracy,it also preserved the possibility of their secret proximity. Unconsciously,it presented them as brothers as well as opposites. And in the extendedanalysis of the nature of counter-revolutionary conspiracy whichformed a central part of the ‘political morality’ speech, Robespierrewent on to explore this fratricidal link, almost in spite of himself. Initially,he tried to strike an upbeat note. Such was the success of the republicanmovement, he argued, that no longer did anybody dare to broadcastaristocratic principles. Unfortunately, however, this did not mean thataristocracy had been totally eradicated; it simply meant that it had beenforced to take up the mask of patriotism, mimicking republican dis-course in an attempt to subvert it from within. Sometimes they had


sought to dilute revolutionary zeal, as the Dantonists had done; some-times, as in the case of the Hébertists, they had urged it to self-destruc-tive excess. In each case true republicans had been temporarily seducedby the mere performance of patriotism, but they would know to be morewatchful in future:

In treacherous hands, all of the remedies to our ills will become poisons; every-thing that you are capable of doing, they will turn against you; even the truthsthat we have just put forward.59

Obsessed by counter-revolution, and yet increasingly unable to dis-tinguish it from itself, in this formulation revolutionary discoursebecomes prey to a form of self-distrust. Thus it became crucial forRobespierre to argue that the real difference between the despotism ofliberty against tyranny and its absolute opposite lay in the inner inten-tions lying behind them, precisely because they were so identical in theireffects. Hence he sought repose in the notion of the conscience as theonly real proof of virtue, a deeply internal principle, existing anterior toboth political language and political praxis, outside the realm of conven-tional representation. And this is why it is tempting to see his laterspeeches in terms of an identifiably Rousseauvian tradition of confes-sion, for as he said on the day preceding the Thermidorean conspiracyagainst him: ‘Take my conscience away from me, and I would be themost unhappy of men’.60


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